Latest Stories

• 
  Sex, Drugs and Personal Trauma: What Online Restaurant Reviews Reveal About Our Inner Selves

  April 11 at 9:59 a.m.

  A new study out of Stanford university has some interesting things to say about the psychological make-up of online reviewers. After analyzing the language in 900,000 Yelp reviews, some distinct patterns emerged. The basics are this: We think fancy restaurants are sexy, we think delicious cheap food is like drugs,...

• 
  YelpLibs: More Fun with Yelp Reviews

  January 27 at 6 a.m.

  There is no official Yelp edition of Mad Libs (yet), but thanks to The Bold Italic, there is now an unofficial one called YelpLibs that combines Mad Libs with, as the website describes them, "angry Yelp reviews." As it turns out, playing the word game - this version of it, anyway -...

• 
  The Worst Restaurant in L.A. is at the Hollywood and Highland Center?

  November 11 at 7 a.m.

  In addition to its annual list of America's 101 best restaurants, the The Daily Meal this year decided to one-up itself and publish an alternate slideshow of the nation's 10 worst restaurants (click bait, anyone?). The list was compiled from restaurants with "the most consistently terrible reviews on the Internet,"...

• 
  Yelpers Want Off the "Slave Ship," Sue for Payment

  October 30 at 6:45 a.m.

  A California class action lawsuit has been filed by a group of Yelp reviewers claiming that they are actually unpaid employees, and that it's their hard work that makes the company a viable business. The lawsuit claims, "Yelp earns its income by selling advertising on its site, the content of...

• 
  The Cheapest, Priciest and Most Hipster Eats in L.A. According to Yelp Reviews

  July 24 at 10 a.m.

  When Yelp released its data-driven heat map two weeks ago, it acted as a visual confirmation of our most deeply held stereotypes about dining in L.A.: that Silver Lake is full of PBR-swilling hipsters, Westwood -- and to a lesser extent, the USC area -- is swimming with frat guys;...

• 
  The Top 3 Ways Restaurants Can Raise Their Yelp Rating

  April 12 at 7 a.m.

  This week, I was on a panel at the International Association of Culinary Professionals conference in San Francisco. The panel was about restaurant criticism in the age of Yelp, and one of my fellow panelists was Morgan Remmers, Yelp's Manager of Local Business Outreach. The issue of how restaurateurs can...